Why GID Must Be Removed From the DSM

Suzan

9 years ago

Gender Identity Disorder is a fiction. It was created to allow the psychiatric profession to bill insurance companies. For reference see Deborah Rudacille’s Riddle of Gender which explains both why and how it was placed in the DSM. See also Phyllis Burke’s Gender Shock.

As for medical insurance covering either the year of psychotherapy or SRS: For them to cover this presumes it is a new condition that struck after one was already covered by the insurance and not a pre-existing condition.

As far back as 1970 Blue Cross and Blue Shield of California were denying coverage to any transsexual who had come out prior to seeking coverage. They also denied it to those who were obviously transsexual and who went seeking coverage prior to transitioning.

SRS along with women’s right to abortion and contraception are already being stricken from any public heath insurance proposed by the anemic liberals as a way of pacifying the implacable ultra right wing extremists and the misogynistic, homophobic and transphobic Taliban Christians. Therefore the idea that keeping GID will allow coverage by either private health insurers who look at denying coverage as a performance bonus enhancer or by the public option as dictated by religious bigots is pretty bogus.

To argue that it endangers the insurance coverage within the USA it to argue from a position of incredible privilege that assumes all transsexual or transgender people are privileged enough to have health insurance. In San Francisco, a place where demographic statistics of unemployment of transsexual and transgender people are actually kept, those stats show a higher than 50% unemployment or under employment rate. Further many positions limit the hours of workers in order to deny them coverage.

For the uninsured the burden of being expected to make some pseudo-medical shrink’s Mercede’s payments is an oppressive insult to their being, their freedom, and their right to have control over their own body. It used a fraudulent label of mental illness to deny agency and to exploit.

It deprives those forced to pay for this mandated “treatment” of income needed for actual medical treatment. Income they may well need for housing and other costs of both living and transition. In that way it is as exploitative of the poor as the Pay Day Loans and Check Cashing places that charge 300% per annum interest.

Having GID in the DSM permits and encourages the abuse of transkids that is on every level as horrible and destructive of these children as the infant genital mutilation done on children with physically obvious at birth intersex conditions. If you doubt this one I suggest you track down Dylan Scholinski book The Last Time I Wore a Dress. They kept him locked up for three years maxing out medical insurance benefits to pay for their abusing him.

Among other things it permits the psychiatrists to torture using Electro Shock to the brain as well as powerful psychotropic drugs aimed at destroying the transkids being in order to erase it prior to rebuilding a gender conforming acceptable being.

GID is a rewriting of religious taboo in pseudo scientific terninology.

Once labeled as a pervert with an incurable mental illness it is easy to deny employment in a whole range of professions most notably, teaching.

When we told our life stories honestly in the 1960s and 1970s they called us liars and yet within the vast majority of our life narratives there are common elements that in and of themselves are indicative of a common shared history. But if our narratives had elements that did not fit particular screeners stereotypes they decided that we were lying about those elements that did.

Rather than trust people with transsexualism to be part of the screening process they told us we were too close to not be biased and so they stuck in people who were biased based on their religious ideology. People like Paul McHugh, whose extremist brand of Catholicism means he is both misogynistic and transphobic. He is the man behind the ending of SRS as a legitimate procedure and the creation of GID as pathology.

GID as a diagnosis has a number of draw backs and zero benefits. That we are labeled as mentally ill is used as justification to deny employment, to deny civil rights protections as well as to look upon us unfavorably in almost any matter involving the courts. Including name change and divorce proceedings. It can be grounds for the denying of employment. Further thanks to the ultra right wing extremist late Senator Jesse Helms it is also excluded from the Americans with Disability Act. It is a stigma that permits social abuse rather than a protected diagnosis.

Kelley Winters has written a book that outlines many of the reasons why the fiction of GID needs removal from the DSM. The book is titled Gender Madness in American Psychiatry: Essays from the Struggle for Dignity.

France has already removed GID from its version of the DSM and the Scandinavian countries are moving in that direction,

One of the best reasons of all for removing GID from the DSM is that it would disempower Kennith Zucker, Richard Green, Ray Blanchard, and Michael Bailey and would place them in the same family of NARTH quacks as Paul Cameron, Charles Socarides, and Joseph Nicolosi.

It would a priori deny any validity what so ever among reasonable people to the slanderous garbage and lies that they write.